About Jacob Dahlgren

Jacob Dahlgren uses the language and imagery of the quotidian to confront the legacies of abstraction. Dahlgren filters tropes of 20th-century abstract art, such as targets, minimalist grids, and Op-art patterns, through everyday objects and imagery. One of his most enduring projects involves his visiting public spaces and photographing individuals he finds there who are wearing T-shirts with horizontal stripes. In another work, Dahlgren covered a wall with concentric circles—an allusion to both Jasper Johns’s and Kenneth Noland's iconic target paintings—stabbing the centers with a pencil, as if the totem of midcentury American abstraction were a dartboard. Such projects create an intersection between the conceptual aspirations of abstraction and the often-overlooked details of contemporary life.